An embattled political leader faces repeated losses before a staunchly opposed Supreme Court. With the Court taking a markedly different view of the Constitution, he watches as key parts of his legislative agenda are dismantled. He lashes out publicly at the Court’s decisions, only worsening public opinion about his motives. More losses loom on the horizon, and members of his party begin to question aloud whether the Supreme Court is protecting democracy or just executing a power grab.

The leader in question is of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the year is 1935, and the legislation is the New Deal. The similarities with the Conservative government’s current struggles, however, are marked. It’s not often that our current Prime Minister has been compared to FDR, but the contrast provides some insight into the costs of tangling with the highest court.

Roosevelt rose to power in 1933 in the shadow of the Great Depression, elected in large part due to his promise to use aggressive economic policies to stimulate growth. By 1935 these policies were in shambles. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out regulations setting maximum work hours, protecting the right to unionize and helping farmers fight foreclosures as inconsistent with the Constitution. Embarrassingly, several decisions accused Roosevelt of exceeding his authority, strengthening his opponents’ claims that he was a dictator in the making.

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The President was furious. Having concentrated as much power in his own hands as possible, he was now being obstructed by an ideologically opposed judiciary. He publicly insulted the Court’s reasoning at a press conference, creating a scandal. Eventually, he cooked up a scheme to “pack” the Supreme Court — threatening to use his authority to appoint up to six additional justices favourable to his position, before the Court backed down and upheld some of his measures.

Eighty years later and north of the border, the stakes are lower but the battles just as fierce. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rebuked the Conservatives in the past few months, undoing plans to reform the Senate and elements of the government’s flagship “tough on crime” agenda. Warrantless data collection by police, the country’s prostitution laws, and reduced credit offered to prisoners for time served have each fallen foul of a Supreme Court with a notably different (and considerably more favourable) view of the Charter than that held by the government. The Prime Minister has also tried to discredit Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, a scrap that even fellow Conservatives describe as “unwinnable.” The government now must redraft old legislation and refight old fights, slowing the Conservatives in their self-professed aim to fundamentally change how the country is run.

Both Harper and Roosevelt pushed through laws of dubious constitutionality and, when challenged, both sought to undermine one of the last bodies able to rein them in

There is no great risk that the Prime Minister is about to pack the Court with sympathizers. Indeed, the majority of the justices are already Harper appointees, which does not appear to have been enough to save the government’s projects so far. But what we see in these histories are the struggles of two would-be-transformative leaders acting at the limits of their power.

Both Harper and Roosevelt adopted a strategy of concentrating authority in their own hands. Both pushed through laws of dubious constitutionality and, when challenged, both sought to undermine one of the last bodies able to rein them in. Harper and other members of the Conservative party now appear to be testing how vocal they can be in their criticisms of the Court and the Charter without further compromising their credibility.

Roosevelt, although his policies eventually prevailed, emerged from his battles with the Court battered and discredited. It remains to be seen what similarities there might be with the Prime Minister in this respect.

Rare film footage featuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt walking to his seat at a baseball game helps dispel the myth that he tried to hide his disability and shows the courage it took to go about his daily life, experts said Friday.

The clip shows FDR, who was paralyzed from the waist down by polio in 1921, grasping a rail with one hand while being supported on the other side by an assistant. FDR used a wheelchair because he could walk only with braces on his legs and the support of a cane.

“Here is FDR going to a stadium full of people,” said Bob Clark, deputy director of FDR’s Presidential Library and Museum. “Even the simple act of going to a baseball game required a great deal of logistics and preparation.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZQ3k-nVrAc&w=620&h=349]

Former Major League Baseball player Jimmie DeShong shot the film at the 1937 All-Star game in Washington. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg announced it had acquired the clip from the family of DeShong, a native of the state’s capital city.

Relatives allowed the footage to be used in an exhibit at the FDR library in Hyde Park, New York, where it has been on view for about a year as part of a montage, Clark said.

Filmmaker Ken Burns calls the footage “one of the very best pieces of film that so clearly shows what a brave struggle it was for FDR to move.” Burns plans to incorporate it into his upcoming documentary on the Roosevelts, which is slated to air on PBS this fall.

The footage is rare in part because not many people had personal movie cameras in those days. The press generally did not film FDR struggling to move under his own power, as the Secret Service did not want to publicize the president’s vulnerability, experts said.

The FDR snippet is about eight seconds of DeShong’s silent footage, which overall is nearly three minutes long.

The rest of the film, shot with an 8 millimeter camera at Griffith Stadium, features a slew of baseball players, including Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg and Dizzy Dean.

Woodrow Wilson is widely disparaged as an ineffectual dreamer. But as A. Scott Berg’s newly published biography of the 28th President of the United States (excerpted recently on these pages) makes clear, Wilson was in fact an exceptional leader. He founded the Federal Reserve, enacted the Clayton Antitrust Act, reduced tariffs, and tried admirably to veto the lunacy of Prohibition. He is rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson, and perhaps John Quincy Adams, as the greatest intellect ever to occupy the White House. He composed his own speeches and delivered them ex tempore — often with overpowering eloquence.

More important, Wilson was the greatest prophet of the Twentieth Century, in many ways surpassing and even presaging Gandhi and Mandela: He was the first person to inspire the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace, and of the acceptance and imposition of international law and of postcolonial institutions indicative of the equal rights of all nationalities and the common interest of all peoples.

Though a pacifist whose youth was spent in Virginia as that state was shattered by the armies of Grant and Lee, Wilson proved to be one of America’s greatest war leaders

When the insane decision of the German emperor and general staff to unleash submarine attacks on neutral American-flag merchant shipping in 1917 forced Wilson to enter World War I, the British Empire already had suffered about 750,000 dead. France, a country of a little more than 40 million, had endured about 1.5 million dead, two million injured, and the destruction of much of its industrial heartland. Italy, which entered the war in 1915 on the Allied side, had suffered about 750,000 dead. Wilson uplifted the Allied nations, and even many people in ostensibly enemy countries, by declaring that the entry of the United States into the “most terrible of all wars” was “to make the world safe for democracy”; it was a “war to end war.” Conceptually and tactically, it was genius, and Woodrow Wilson, though a pacifist whose youth was spent in Virginia as that state was shattered by the armies of Grant and Lee, proved to be one of America’s greatest war leaders, not outshone by Washington, Lincoln or FDR. (Unfortunately, his Virginia background also lumbered him with a discreditable toleration of racial segregation.)

As everyone knows, he mismanaged the ratification process of the Treaty of Versailles, largely because he suffered a series of incapacitating strokes, and was repudiated by partisans in his own Congress. The League of Nations, which Wilson conceived, was launched without the United States, and it was later sabotaged by Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese Imperialists and Stalin, with the effective complicity of the Anglo-French appeasers. It devolved upon a junior member of Wilson’s administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president during the world war that Wilson sought to avoid, to revive the idea of a world organization, involve the opposing domestic political party fully in its creation, and have it in place even before that war ended in 1945.

Illustration by Sarah Lazarovic

FDR took the best of Wilson and of his chief rival, distant cousin (and uncle-in-law) Theodore Roosevelt, and united the latter’s “big stick” with the former’s “new freedom.” FDR was determined that the UN would not be reduced to a mere talking shop. He intended that it would serve to disguise in collegiality the fact that the United States, with half the world’s economic product and a monopoly on atomic weapons, effectively ruled the world, and would reassure his fractious and long-isolationist countrymen that the world was now a much safer place than it had been.

In fact, Roosevelt realized that if the United States were not engaged in Europe and the Far East, there would be a constant risk every generation, that the forces of totalitarianism could take over the entire Eurasian land-mass and leave the Americas, as he put it in two famous speeches in 1940, “as prisoners … living at the point of a gun, and … fed through the bars of our cage by the unpitying masters of other continents.”

Roosevelt calculated that in the opening decades, a majority of UN members would be either Latin American countries that would take their lead from the United States; Commonwealth allies of the British and Americans; or countries otherwise dependent on U.S. assistance, such as Nationalist China, pre-Gaullist France, and Italy. His calculations were correct for about 25 years, and the Soviet absence from the United Nations on a boycott enabled the world organization to agree on an American-led international response to North Korean aggression in 1950. The immense economic powerhouse of today’s democratic South Korea is the result of this intervention (and the pestilential hermit state of North Korea the very visible alternative). Roosevelt’s strategic team, led by his successors, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, General Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and others, implemented the Containment policy against the Soviet Union, which, of course, led to the disintegration of the USSR and the collapse of international communism in 45 years, without another major war.

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But the United Nations has become an exercise in virtual theatre, a perpetual Gong Show in which the underdeveloped (economically and otherwise) majority extends the frontiers of perversity by their provocations of the advanced countries that pay the UN’s bills. It must only be the imperishability of the Wilson-Roosevelt vision that such an organization, now with nearly 200 members, could eventually evolve into a worthwhile forum for productive exchanges of views and the assertion of some inborn moral authority, that has sustained it to the present.

When U.S. President George W. Bush addressed the United Nations in 2003, he declared that the contemplated American action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was intended to prevent the UN from becoming a paper tiger, as the League of National had quickly become — and that Iraq should be punished for ignoring 17 Security Council resolutions pursuant to the cease-fire at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Almost no one paid any attention to him, but his point was a good one and should have carried a great deal more weight than concerns about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Yet, a decade later, in 2013, the United Nations General Assembly elected China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, countries that have no regard for human rights at all, as members of the UN Human Rights Council; selected Hezbollah (a designated terrorist organization) apologist Jean Ziegler as senior advisor to the Council; and elected Mauritania, a primitive country that tolerates slavery, as Council vice-chair. Meanwhile, Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on “the American global domination project” and “Tel Aviv.” Of the UN General Assembly’s 25 resolutions condemning individual countries in 2013, all but four were against the exemplary democracy, Israel, which only seeks recognition of the basis on which the United Nations founded it: as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people. The United Nations also elected the racist, terrorist-infested charnel house and Iranian proxy of Syria to its Special Committee on Decolonization; appointed Zimbabwe (a regime so odious it has been expelled from the Commonwealth, failing to clear an almost subterranean hurdle) to host its world tourism summit; and elected Iran president of its 2013 Conference on Disarmament, even as that country strove to put the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the shredder.

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty ImagesU.S. President Barack Obama addresses the 67th UN General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Sept. 25, 2012.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Minister John Baird deserve the praise of all Canadians for refusing to confer any credence or dignity at all of this mockery. The fact that the Obama administration is more respectful of the United Nations than any American government since Jimmy Carter’s does not make the UN more palatable; rather, it underscores that the U.S. government has moved as far from the inspiring leadership standards of Wilson and Roosevelt as the world organization has from their hopes for it.

The Liberals and NDP should be ashamed of their pillory of the government for its skeptical stance toward the United Nations. As I have written here before, Canada should take the lead amongst advanced countries in agitating for reform of the United Nations. And given the lassitude that now afflicts American foreign policy — at the UN and otherwise — we should finally begin to shoulder our own responsibilities for the defence of this country.

We owe the United States for the security of Canada for the last 75 years, but have neither the right, nor any reason, to expect with any confidence that that condition will continue indefinitely. Our national interest will not be served by allowing the Canadian Navy to dwindle to 10 major surface combat ships, as now seems possible, any more than it has been with this shambles of an interceptor-aircraft replacement policy. I do not anticipate this hypothesis to come to reality any time soon, but if either China or Russia threatened Canada now, we have no reason to expect that the United States (let alone the United Nations) would act decisively to end the threat. Canada is one of the world’s 10 or so most important countries. And in 2014, rather than indulging in multilateral UN sentimentality and open-ended dependence on resolute American generosity, we must act the part.

Fifty years after the murder of President John F. Kennedy, the event is scarcely less saddening than it was in its immediate aftermath. It must rank with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as the most graphically shocking and horrifying moment in modern American history.

The United States had endured a presidential assassination three times before — but not in the electronic age. In the cases of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901, the assassinations were vividly sketched and described, and the country was profoundly shocked in every case. But the endless televised reruns of the motorcade in Dallas, the solicitude of Jacqueline Kennedy, and then the horror within the presidential car and on the roadside when it was clear that a terrible wound had been sustained, is a ghastly and indelible recollection to everyone, in a way that a drawing, however skillfully executed, cannot be.

Unlike Lincoln, President Kennedy was not a gigantic statesman who had saved the Union, emancipated the slaves, and seen the country through a horrible war in which more Americans died than in all other American wars in history combined. JFK was only 46, and was not three years into his presidency. Lincoln, by contrast, announced that he was “an old man” in his famous leave-taking at Springfield in 1861 as he went to his inauguration, “not knowing when or whether ever I may return,” though he was only 52. It was a century earlier, and Lincoln had led a hard life. He was departing his home to assume the headship of a country that was already in the deepest crisis in its history, with states seceding preemptively each week.

The greatest contrast with previous analogous tragedies in American history was that JFK was glamorous; he was a star. Abraham Lincoln, for all his greatness, and partly because of it, was not glamorous, nor was his harridanly and somewhat maladjusted wife. John F. Kennedy was a fair and tousle-haired, intelligently ingenuous, stylish scion of a wealthy family. It was an altogether different appeal from that of the craggy product of the log cabin and the rail-splitting youth and itinerant frontier lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. For her part, Jacqueline Kennedy was only 34 when her husband was murdered, and was an elegant, trilingual, stylishly dressed and refined woman.

Garfield had been a university head in his twenties (Western Reserve), a distinguished combat citizen general in the Civil War, and was the only person ever to make the jump directly from congressman to president (though he had already been elected senator but not installed). But he was not glamorous, and glamor was not in 1880 what it was in the 1960s.

JFK had an altogether different appeal from itinerant frontier lawyer Abraham Lincoln, the craggy product of the log cabin and a rail-splitting youth

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William McKinley had had a good war as a middle officer, and the war with Spain was a walkover. He was a journeyman senator and a solid plough-horse, but he, too, was in no sense glamorous.

Of presidents who died in office, the closest in some respects to President Kennedy was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a great star; at least lived in the era of films, newsreels, and glossy magazines; and who captured and held the imagination of the nation and the world in a way that Kennedy consciously tried to replicate, down to the smiling countenance and the identification by his three initials. But FDR, though only 63 when he died, passed on from a stroke in his great office in his fourth term, was 17 years older than JFK, and cannot be claimed to have died entirely prematurely.

The deaths of FDR and JFK provoked the two greatest outbreaks of public grief in the nation’s history, apart from the death of Lincoln. Two million people stood silently beside the track at all hours of the day and night, as the funeral train bore the casket of President Roosevelt back from Warm Springs, Georgia to Washington, and on to his ancestral home at Hyde Park, New York.

As president, Kennedy followed and concluded what must in hindsight be considered the golden age of the U.S. presidency, through the distinguished incumbencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The record of those leaders, taking the country out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II, and through the worst phase of the Cold War, founding NATO and creating the Marshall Plan, defending Korea, and proposing Atoms for Peace and Open Skies, and delivering a peaceful and prosperous America beginning to desegregate, were probably the greatest sustained period of presidential accomplishment in the history of the office.

National Archive/Newsmakers

John F. Kennedy moved it forward a whole generation (his three predecessors were born between 1882 and 1890). But apart from the appearance of vigor (which disguised severe medical problems and excessive medication, not to dwell upon apparent satyriasis), his record in office was thin and composed more of promise than fact. JFK came late to the correct conclusion on civil rights and taxes, but couldn’t move them legislatively, and it was his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who got those measures adopted.

He probably deserves the benefit of the doubt that he would not have made such a terrible mess of Vietnam as his successor did; would have avoided it, or if he had intervened directly, would have followed the advice of Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and other serious military experts and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But as it is, the chief responsibility for turning Laos into a superhighway of North Vietnamese infiltration of the South resides with Kennedy for the Laos Neutrality Agreement — which Richard Nixon, who may well have been the real winner of the 1960 election (and has received minimal credit for not contesting it and consequently immobilizing the country) called “Communism on the installment plan.”

Kennedy did sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but most of the preparatory work was done by Eisenhower. His great triumph is commonly held to be the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and he does deserve much credit for distrusting blasé military and intelligence assurances of an easy invasion option, when there were in fact short-range nuclear warheads and two Soviet divisions already in-country. But before the crisis, there were NATO missiles in Greece and Turkey, and no Soviet missiles in Cuba, and no guarantee by the U.S. of non-invasion of Cuba. At the end of the crisis, there were no missiles in Greece and Turkey (contrary to the wishes of those countries), or Cuba, and the U.S. had undertaken not to invade Cuba. It was prudent management, but as Charles de Gaulle and Richard Nixon pointed out, it was no American strategic victory.

John F. Kennedy was probably an above-average president, and might have been a very talented two-term president, but that is rank conjecture. All the bunk about Camelot (a musical he didn’t even enjoy) has burnished a rather humdrum record. But he will always remain an admired and lamented man, whose life and death were an evanescent source of encouragement, and a permanent tragedy.

On November 20, The Cundill Prize in Historical Literature at McGill will be awarded to the author of a book “determined to have had (or likely to have) a profound literary, social and academic impact in the area of history.” This week and next, the National Post will be publishing excerpts from all six 2013 Cundill Prize finalists.

On a soft April morning in 1939, Charles Lindbergh was summoned to the White House to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arguably the only person in America who equaled him in fame. The images of the two men had been indelibly impressed on the nation’s consciousness for years — Lindbergh, whose solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 had mesmerized and inspired his countrymen, and Roosevelt, whose energetic, confident leadership had helped jolt a Depression-mired America back to life.

When Lindbergh was ushered into the Oval Office, he found FDR seated behind his desk. It was their first face-to-face encounter, but no one would have guessed that from the president’s warm, familiar manner. Leaning forward to clasp Lindbergh’s hand, Roosevelt welcomed him as if he were an old friend, asking him about his wife, Anne, who, the president noted, had been a high school classmate of FDR’s daughter, Anna.

His head thrown back, with his trademark cigarette holder tilted rakishly upward, Roosevelt exuded charm, joie de vivre, and an unmistakable air of power and command. During his 30-minute chat with Lindbergh, he gave no sign of the many grave problems weighing on his mind.

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He was, in fact, in the midst of one of the greatest crises of his presidency. Europe was on the brink of war. The month before, Adolf Hitler had seized all of Czechoslovakia, violating the promise he had made at the 1938 Munich conference to cease his aggression against other countries. In response, Britain and France had promised to come to the aid of Poland, the next country on Germany’s hit list, if it were invaded. Both Western nations, however, were desperately short of arms, a situation that FDR was trying to remedy. But he was faced with a dilemma. Thanks to the provisions of neutrality legislation passed by Congress a few years earlier, Britain and France would be barred from buying U.S. weapons once they declared war on Germany. As Roosevelt knew, his chances of persuading the House and Senate to repeal the arms ban were close to zero.

But he mentioned none of that in his conversation with Lindbergh. Nor, in the course of his genial banter, did he betray any hint of the considerable suspicion and distrust he felt for the younger man sitting opposite him. Five years before, Roosevelt and Lindbergh had engaged in what the writer Gore Vidal called a “mano a mano duel,” in which the president emerged as the loser. FDR hated to lose, and his memories of the 1934 incident were still raw and bitter.

The clash had been prompted by Roosevelt’s cancellation of airmail delivery contracts granted by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, to the nation’s largest airlines. Charging fraud and bribery in the contract process, Roosevelt directed the U.S. Army Air Corps to start delivering the mail. Lindbergh, who served as an adviser to one of the airlines, publicly criticized FDR for ending the contracts without giving the companies a chance to respond.

On the day they were to vacate the building, the owners of the Real Jerk restaurant were in court seeking an injunction that would give them more timeOn the day they were to vacate the building, the owners of the Real Jerk restaurant were in court seeking an injunction that would give them more time.
Ed and Lily Pottinger have been fighting eviction since learning in December the property at Queen Street and Broadview Avenue had been sold.
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Mr. Pottinger said they were never informed the landlord was selling the property and had been told they would be given at least two years’ notice.
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The lawyer for Bill Mandelbaum, the property’s new owner, said the new tenants — who would be paying nearly double the rent the Pottingers paid — were planning to open an Irish pub and want to be open for St. Patrick’s Day.
“If they don’t open by March 17 they are in big trouble,” said David Weisman.
The Pottingers’ lawyer, Albert Formosa, said they owned the restaurant for 23 years and should be treated as lease holders.
The judge said she would rule on Wednesday.
<em>National Post</em>

Less than seven years after his history-making flight, the 32-year-old Lindbergh was the only person who could match the 52-year-old president in national popularity. They were alike in other ways, too. Both were strong-willed, stubborn men who believed deeply in their own superiority and had a sense of being endowed with a special purpose. They were determined to do things their own way, were slow to acknowledge mistakes, and did not take well to criticism. Self-absorbed and emotionally detached, they insisted on being in control at all times. A friend and distant relative of FDR’s once described him as having “a loveless quality, as if he were incapable of emotion.” Of Lindbergh, a biographer wrote: “The people he called friend were mainly, to him, good, functional, temporary acquaintances. He seemed to have taken much more than he gave in the way of warmth and affection.”

The conflict between the president and Lindbergh quickly became front-page news. A former airmail pilot himself, Lindbergh warned that Air Corps fliers had neither the experience nor the right type of instruments in their planes to take on the extremely hazardous job of delivering the mail, which often involved night flying in blizzards, heavy rain, and other extreme weather. To the administration’s embarrassment, his assessment proved correct. In the four months that Army pilots flew the mail, there were 66 crashes, 12 deaths, and, as one writer put it, “untold humiliation” for the Air Corps and White House. On June 1, 1934, following rushed negotiations between the government and airlines to come up with new delivery agreements, the commercial companies resumed mail delivery.

For the first time in his year-old presidency, FDR found himself bested in the court of public opinion. According to the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “the fight dented the myth of Roosevelt’s invulnerability. [It] also uncovered in Charles Lindbergh a man who perhaps appealed to more American hearts than anyone save Franklin Roosevelt.”

The following year, Lindbergh took his family to live in England, then France. During his three-year stay in Europe, he made several highly publicized trips to Nazi Germany, where he inspected aircraft companies and air force bases — and made clear he thought that the German air force was invincible and that Britain and France must appease Hitler.

TTC chair Karen Stintz shook with emotion at City Hall after Mayor Rob Ford’s allies on the commission voted to block a report she says would have made the case for building part of the Eglinton light rail line on the street<strong></strong>TTC chair Karen Stintz shook with emotion at City Hall after Mayor Rob Ford’s allies voted to block a transit report that would have bolstered the case for building part of the Eglinton light rail line on the street.
A series of 6-to-3 votes on the Eglinton-Scarborough-Crosstown extension blindsided the chair, who has been at odds with the Mayor over whether the midtown corridor should be underground, or above ground in the more spacious suburbs. The gulf widened on Tuesday, as the provincial agency building the line demanded in writing the city figure out what kind of transit it wants. The TTC’s decision tells the province “that we’re not interested in getting our act together,” an angry Ms. Stintz told reporters after the meeting.
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“The commission had a decision that they could get that information and debate it, and consider it ... and they chose not to receive it, and not to even ask for it.”
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TTC vice chair Peter Milczyn, and commissioners Denzil Minnan-Wong, Norm Kelly, Frank Di Giorgio, Vince Crisanti and Cesar Palacio voted to limit discussions among TTC staff and their counterparts at Metrolinx, the provincial agency that is building the Crosstown, and Infrastructure Ontario. The commission asked its chief general manager, Gary Webster, to report back on some project details, but not to “present an analysis of the Crosstown scope, alignment and vehicle technology.”
Ms. Stintz says that would have made the case for the cheaper option of raising to street level the eastern leg of Eglinton and using the savings on other transit projects.
“It was going to be the recommendation of the TTC that we strongly consider an at-grade alignment,” she said. “We spent a premium designing low-floor vehicles that run at grade. We made the investment in the vehicles so we wouldn’t have to spend the money to dig the tunnel.”
The Mayor, however, maintains the $8.4-billion in provincial funding should go to burying almost all of the Eglinton line, and turning the Scarborough RT into light rail, as per the deal he signed with the province. It must be ratified by city council. Both lines are expected to be in operation in 2020.
Ford critics said Tuesday’s vote was an attempt to thwart opposition to the Mayor’s plan, but Councillor Minnan-Wong and vice-chair Milczyn insist they are not trying to censor debate. They say a forthcoming report will deal with areas of dispute.
“The issue Councillor Minnan-Wong and I and others had was just giving a blank cheque to TTC staff to take their own positions which aren’t necessarily positions that all of us are aware of or consulted on,” said Councillor Milczyn.
He added: “Starting to have a whole debate about what [Metrolinx is] doing and why they’re doing it, is that not what people are complaining about that the Mayor is getting involved in things that he shouldn’t? So now you want us, the commission, to start interfering with Metrolinx? That’s the perfect way to slow down the process.”
Mr. Webster, the chief general manager, said he was “confused” as to the commission’s intent and would seek clarification.
The same could be said of Metrolinx, which underscored the urgency of the situation. “Absent council’s endorsement of the MoU, the city is not bound by the plan and it is increasingly difficult for Metrolinx to implement it,” Metrolinx Chair Robert Prichard wrote in a letter addressed to the Mayor and Ms. Stintz.
What Tuesday’s vote means for the future of Ms. Stintz as head of the commission remains unclear, but she is looking for ways to release the information in question, while others are looking to bring the transit plan to a vote, perhaps by calling a special meeting.
Also on Tuesday, the commission decided that the $5-million council granted it to prevent “service reductions” should go to Wheel-Trans service, not reversing controversial bus cuts. That means that come Feb. 12, the TTC will run fewer buses at peak hours on 35 routes, and off-peak times on 36 bus and streetcar routes.
<em>National Post</em>
<em>• Email: <a href="mailto:nalcoba@nationalpost.com">nalcoba@nationalpost.com</a> | Twitter: <a class="twitter-follow-button" href="http://twitter.com/NPHallMonitor">NPHallMonitor</a></em&gt;

And now he was home, ostensibly to join General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Air Corps, in an effort to build up America’s own airpower as quickly as possible. But was he plotting something else? The last thing Roosevelt needed was a campaign to stir up public opposition to the idea of arms sales to Britain and France. He had invited Lindbergh to the White House to get a sense of the man, to try to figure out how much of a problem he might pose in the turbulent days to come.

During his session with Roosevelt, Lindbergh was well aware that the president was scrutinizing him closely. Writing later in his journal, he noted, “Roosevelt judges his man quickly and plays him cleverly.” Although he thought FDR “a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy,” Lindbergh still enjoyed the encounter. “There is no reason for any antagonism between us,” he observed. “The air-mail situation is past.” He would continue to work with the administration on ways to improve the nation’s air defenses, but, he added, “I have a feeling that it may not be for long.”

He was right. In early September, just five months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany. The following spring, German troops swept through Western Europe, vanquishing France and threatening Britain’s survival. As unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationist movement, Lindbergh emerged as Franklin Roosevelt’s most redoubtable adversary in what would become a brutal, no-holds- barred battle for the soul of the nation.

Until May 1940, most Americans had viewed the war in Europe as if it were a movie — a drama that, while interesting to watch, had nothing to do with their own lives. But the shock of Germany’s blitzkrieg demolished that belief. It forced the country to struggle with two crucial questions: Should it come to the aid of Britain, the last hope of freedom in Europe? Or should it go even further and enter the war?

For the next 18 months, the debate over those issues raged throughout the nation, from the White House and halls of Congress to bars, beauty parlors, offices, and classrooms in the biggest of cities and smallest of towns. “The war was everywhere,” one historian recalled. “It lay behind everything you said or did.” Millions of Americans were swept up in the struggle, knowing that whatever its outcome, their lives were likely to be profoundly affected. At stake was not only the survival of Britain but the shape and future of America.

What was the United States to be? A fortress country that refused to break out of its isolationist shell, still clinging to the belief that it could survive and thrive only if it were free from entangling foreign commitments? The adherents to that view pointed to the aftermath of World War I as proof of its validity. We had been tricked, they argued, into coming to the aid of Britain and France in 1917, thereby losing more than 50,000 of our young men and providing our allies with loans that were never repaid. We were supposedly making the world safe for democracy, but in fact democracy had cravenly given way to Adolf Hitler. Britain, France, and the rest of Western Europe had repeatedly demonstrated an inability to settle their own disputes. If those countries refused to stop Hitler when they could have, why should we bail them out again? We must be ready to fight for the defense of our own nation, but for nothing and no one else.

For their part, those who argued for U.S. intervention maintained that America could no longer evade international responsibility: The times were too dire. Britain’s survival was absolutely essential for our security and welfare. If the British were defeated and Hitler controlled all of Europe, he would then move to dominate Africa and infiltrate South America, thus posing a serious threat to the United States. America, the interventionists argued, would have little chance to survive as a free, democratic society.

The dispute over whether America should help Europe was, Arthur Schlesinger said, ‘the most savage political debate in my lifetime’

Others in the interventionist camp emphasized what they viewed as America’s moral obligation to stop Hitler — the embodiment, as they saw it, of pure evil. How could we stand on the sidelines, they argued, while Nazi Germany enslaved sovereign countries, went on a rampage against Jews, and threatened to wipe out Western civilization as we know it?

The CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid remembered the period as “bitter” and “heart-burning.” Arthur Schlesinger said the dispute was “the most savage political debate in my lifetime.” He added: “There have been a number of fierce national quarrels — over communism in the later Forties, over McCarthyism in the Fifties, over Vietnam in the Sixties — but none so tore apart families and friendships as this fight.”

It is a painful, but necessary, duty to address the dismaying subject of Diana West’s book, “American Betrayal,” about which she has written, in the last few days, “The war of words is over.” Her authority for this triumphalist expression of relief is that Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and his co-commentator, Pavel Stroilov, have described Mrs. West’s book as “huge and brilliant.” Part of their review of her book, and much of the debate, has been a fierce firefight including a considerable, though often somewhat entertaining, volume of recriminations that asperse the rigour, motivations, ideological orientation, integrity, and sanity of the two sides.

I do not fit any of the stereotypes erected and riddled with high-explosive projectiles by both camps, and am merely a non-American biographer of Roosevelt and strategic historian, of impeccable conservative credentials. I have enjoyed the previous work of Mrs. West that I have seen. Accordingly, I will try to illuminate the battlefield without injuring anyone unnecessarily, since I am usually in some sympathy with all the combatants. Vladimir Bukovsky, after 12 years in Soviet labor camps and psychiatric hospitals, commands respect as a man, but his article with Mr. Stroilov is, to say the least, un-rigorous, and certainly does not end the war of words. It merely escalates it.

Let us consider what he wrote, in defence of Mrs. West’s assertions that the United States was betrayed by its governments, opposite Soviet Communism, from the 1930s through the 1980s, and then let us return, very succinctly, to the indisputable facts.

Related

I agree with the spirit and object of Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov’s question of how could “this great civilization of ours have [been] degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness.” In this, all the warriors who have raised their faces above the parapets are on the same side. Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov begin with another good thrashing of the useful idiots of the Western intelligentsia and media who whitewashed Stalin’s pre-war crimes.

Where it all starts to go horribly wrong is in the sudden metamorphosis of Walter Duranty, New York Times Pulitzer Prize Stalin apologist, into Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, Mr. Bukovsky has learned, presumably from whatever unimaginable emanations possessed him in his decades of brave resistance to Communism and in his apparently incomplete convalescence since, sought a “convergence” of Stalinist socialism with American constitutional government. This was a process that “had already begun, as the Roosevelt administration was full of Soviet agents of influence, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and crucially, Harry Hopkins — FDR’s alter ego, his ‘personal foreign secretary,’ and the most powerful man in the White House” (presumably not excluding the president himself). These, we read, are “proven facts” of “the glorious FDR administration.”

REUTERS/Tobias SchwarzFile picture shows German Internet millionaire Kim Schmitz during his trial at a district court in Munich May 27, 2002.

Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov write that the Western democracies entered the Second World War to “defend the freedom of Poland,” and “ended it by surrendering Poland and a dozen other nations to a totalitarian empire worse than Hitler’s. Was this really a victory?” Yes, it was. If Soviet dissidents were expecting the Anglo-Americans to sweep away the Soviet Union while they were defeating Nazism in the West and the Japanese imperialists in the Pacific, they were bound to be disappointed.

When Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, the banking and stock- and commodities-exchange systems had collapsed and were closed sine die; unemployment was 33%, and there was no direct federal relief for the victims of it. Roosevelt was a capitalist, and he saved capitalism. He made mistakes, as he said he would, but he salvaged 95% of the system, maintained the moral integrity of the country, and focused the rage and frustration of the era on the country’s true enemies — foreign imperialists. The charge of aspiring to a blended system with Stalinist Communism, with its liquidations and gulags, is unfounded and disgusting. FDR considered it an equivalent evil to Nazism and publicly said so during the Russo-Finnish war, and privately many times, including in his correspondence with Pius XII.

If generations of American leaders were secretly throwing the game against the U.S.S.R., how did the West win?

Hopkins, the purported real power in the White House, was a relief, workfare, and lend-lease administrator; he had no influence on Roosevelt’s foreign policy, though he was sent on a couple of foreign missions. He moved out of the White House when he remarried, before Roosevelt had any dealings with Stalin (surely leaving the president as the undisputedly most influential person in the building). Alger Hiss had no influence, ceased his incompetent efforts at espionage in the mid-Thirties, and did not exchange a word with Roosevelt at Yalta; his only contribution was to recommend, unsuccessfully, that the U.S.S.R. not have three votes in the United Nations general assembly. The purported quotes from FDR and General Marshall are so far out of context, as cited, that they are false.

According to Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov, Mrs. West’s book “persuasively demonstrates” that Roosevelt abandoned “the Italian front to concentrate forces for the invasion of Normandy … because Stalin demanded [it],” as “the pro-Soviet FDR administration rejected such sensible alternatives as advancing from Italy to [the] Balkans and eastern Europe, which might have limited the Red Army’s advance to the West.” A very little knowledge is a very dangerous thing. Churchill and his advisors, veterans of the hecatomb on the Western Front of the First World War, feared direct confrontation with Germany and had the military habits of a great maritime power; they were convinced that Stalin supported the French alternative because he believed, as they (Churchill and Brooke, the chief of the general staff) did, that the Germans would throw the Western Allies into the sea, as they had at Dunkirk, Greece, Crete, and Dieppe.

Roosevelt knew what they thought, but believed that the Allies would succeed, that the war would be won by whoever took most of Germany, and that the only route to the conquest of Germany from the West was through France. Italy was a defending army’s paradise: It took almost two years to clear, compared with six months for France. And the whole notion of landing armies near Trieste and advancing on a narrow front through the “Ljubljana Gap,” which Eisenhower said did not really exist, toward Vienna, was mad. The Germans would have bottled it up more easily than they did the Italian front, and the Soviets would have taken all Germany and, with their local Communist parties, France and northern Italy.

Even Churchill and Brooke acknowledged, after the success of the landings in Normandy and Dragoon (in southern France), that Roosevelt and Marshall were correct. This is why Roosevelt stayed in the Soviet embassy at Tehran, although he knew his rooms were bugged, to ensure that Stalin decided the Normandy-Adriatic argument in his favour (and to Stalin’s own despite, as Roosevelt foresaw). It was a mighty act of diplomatic and strategic genius, on a par with Franklin’s mission to France in 1778 — not, as is claimed by Mrs. West and Mr. Bukovsky, an act of treason by Roosevelt.

Apparently, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Kissinger were all a part of the same conspiracy to deliver the world to the masters in the Kremlin

There are a great many other fantastic claims in the Bukovsky-Stroilov article, such as that Soviet agents in Washington thwarted anti-Nazi plots in Germany; that “the U.S. simply went along with the Sovietization of Eastern Europe in breach of the Yalta Agreement” (my italics; it is elsewhere in the article represented as a sellout to Stalin); that the Cold War “was never much of a war on the Western side,” which raises the question of how we won it; and that “‘détente’ was … developed … secretly, treacherously, through KGB channels, as a means to achieve that ‘convergence’” (yes, the same convergence that was the socioeconomic goal of Roosevelt).

Apparently, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Kissinger were all a part of the same betrayal and conspiracy to disserve America and deliver the world to the masters in the Kremlin. Even George Bush the elder was part of it, though Reagan may have been a chronological island of patriotism in this chain of evil that somehow, despite its fiendish traitorousness, caused the Soviet Union to disintegrate, before the West self-degraded to the fatuous imbecilities of political correctness.

“That treacherous establishment is still there,” write Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov. I wish it were: I wish anyone now visible in a position of influence in Washington had a fraction of the competence or patriotic and democratic and capitalist conviction of those distinguished statesmen whom Mrs. West and Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov have so violently and unjustly assailed.

Could the real Starbucks please fill a cuppa? It's "obviously" unaffiliated, a Starbucks spokesman said, but a 'Dumb Starbucks' parody location that popped up on the weekend in L.A. was legit enough to confuse a few peopleCould the real Starbucks please fill a cuppa?
It's "obviously" unaffiliated, and they "are aware of it and looking into it,” a Starbucks spokesman said of a doppelganger coffee shop that popped up in the weekend in Los Angeles, looking in every way like a real Starbucks, except for, well, the word "dumb" being on the signage, and an explanatory Q&A on what the organizers were doing with their project.
Featured on the menu?
“Dumb Chai Tea Latte,” “Dumb Vanilla Blonde Roast,” “Dumb Caramel Macchiato,” naturally, and of course the coffees and teas were available in sizes “Dumb Venti,” “Dumb Grande,” and “Dumb Tall.”
Even the smaller Starbucks merchandising details were covered off by what organizers said was a use of parody and the fair use act: CDs by the checkouts included: “Dumb Jazz Standards,” “Dumb Norah Jones Duets” and “A Dumb Taste of Cuba.”
Everything was as it is at a real coffee shop, patrons <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/09/l-a-s-dumb-starbucks-imitates-the-real-thing/&quot; target="_blank">reported to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></a>, except coffees were free, and um, the shop ran out of supplies at around 5 p.m. local time, with dozens of "customers" still waiting in line in the Los Feliz neighborhood.
A barista on site was at a loss to explain the shop, saying she'd been hired weeks earlier by a man she didn't recall the name of. Did she think she was part of the art? "I don’t know. What is art? Maybe serving coffee is art,” she said in response, which, we'll leave you to interpret as an answer.
As far as locals' responses went, as you might expect from cool, casual L.A., they went with the flow and got in line:
https://twitter.com/DeanSanchez/status/432924917961461760
Dumb Starbucks, of course, <a href="https://twitter.com/dumbstarbucks&quot; target="_blank">is also on Twitter</a>, already racking up nearly 6,000 followers.
For those more curious, there was the handy FAQ:
[caption id="attachment_132386" align="aligncenter" width="620"]<a href="http://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/dumb21.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-132386" alt="Twitter" src="http://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/dumb21.jpg&quot; width="620" height="827" /></a> Twitter[/caption]
Meanwhile, while the REAL Starbucks was clearly a bit miffed at the L.A. stunt, they may have hot water of their own to crawl out of, as this morning <a href="http://video.foxnews.com/v/3179466098001/starbucks-turns-away-amputee-vet-service-dog&quot; target="_blank">a Fox News report highlighted a U.S. war veteran being turned away from a Starbucks location</a> in Texas because of his service dog, Beans. The veteran is an amputee, and was at the coffee shop to meet with a potential donor to the canine service charity that provided him with his dog, but was repeatedly questioned by a Starbucks employee, who said, according to the veteran, "You're not blind" and demanded to know why he needed a service dog at all, and how he was disabled. At first Iraq war vet Yancy Baer said he thought the staff member was joking, but then had to seek the assistance of another Starbucks barista to remain in the café, which didn't even comp him a drink after that, he said. A district manager apologized to the war vet later on, but Baer still said he won't be visiting Starbucks again.
And if that all sounds a little like a parody itself, well, sometimes life does imitate art, right?
[related_links /]

Most of the rest of the Bukovsky-Stroilov piece is an intra-academic-and-commentariat series of acerbic reflections. But it flares up again with a lot of bunk about how poor old Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent and that American supplies to the U.S.S.R. that helped prevent the German occupation of St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1941 contributed to “such major catastrophes of the Second World War as the defeat [of the] Philippines and the fall of Singapore.” This is a complete fantasy: Admiral Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt had agreed when the U.S. took over the Philippines that it couldn’t defend the islands from the Japanese, and MacArthur did well to hang on for five months. Singapore was an all-British disaster, of little military consequence.

Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov charge that the “consensus about the Cold War,” i.e. that it was carried out seriously with the objective of containing and defeating Soviet Communism without a general war, was “false and corrupt”: “It is a product of the great cover-up. It was the same consensus who first denied the facts about the Soviet crimes and Western complicity … that there was no famine in the Soviet Union … that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were innocent.”

No, Mrs. West and gentlemen, it is not. On other days and other subjects, I am sure that Mrs. West and Mr. Bukovsky, and probably Mr. Stroilov, will write sensibly, but they haven’t done so here. The war of words probably is over, but not as Mrs. West would hope, and not for the reasons she implies.

Soon after the end of the Second World War, after the U.S.S.R. had absorbed more than 90% of the casualties the allies had suffered in subduing Nazi Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and most of Germany were all flourishing and democratic allies of the British and Americans. About 45 years later, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, China was a capitalist country, and Eastern Europe was largely free, without the horrors of a war between the Great Powers. This was a stunning sequence of achievements, of the statesmen who are, apart from President Reagan, smeared by Mrs. West, and Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov.

We all sympathize with and admire Mr. Bukovsky’s endurance of his ordeal. I do so as one who was also unjustly imprisoned, though for only three years and in the vastly gentler regime of the United States. (It was no day at the beach. And it has not destroyed my regard for the U.S., but it has not made me a compulsive American-flag-waver, either.) Whatever injustices any of us may have suffered, they do not entitle us to defame the justly honoured dead, invent and deform history, or impugn the righteousness of our civilization — flawed and tainted and often riddled with hypocrisy though it is, but the best the world has had.

National Review

A longer version of this column originally appeared in the National Review and the New York Sun.

It is generally recognized that the United States is steadily withdrawing from several areas of the world where it has had a large military presence for many years, especially the Middle East, Western Europe, and parts of the Far East.

It is, in fact, engaged in a broad strategic retreat. But this must not be misconstrued as the collapse or permanent decline of that country. It remains an extremely rich nation, with the most productive workforce in the history of the world, and a relatively motivated and overwhelmingly patriotic population. The great majority of Americans are proud of their country and are capable of fighting and sacrificing for it in a plausible cause. Courage is valued and revered; and the performance of the United States armed forces in recent wars has been exemplary.

The United States has never been an aggressive power. Only when the Germans insanely attacked American commercial shipping on the high seas did the United States enter World War I, just as Russia was defeated and left the war. The Americans provided the final margin of victory for the beleaguered French, British and Italians (who took 4-million war dead and nearly 7-million wounded between them). The Americans then turned their back on Wilsonian internationalism and their president’s League of Nations, and emerged from isolation only once Franklin D. Roosevelt, who spoke German and French and knew Europe well, and whose family’s fortune was earned in the Far East, concluded that the United States alone could keep the British Commonwealth in the war, ensure Stalin did not make a separate peace with Hitler (as he attempted to do with the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939), and prevent Japan from overrunning the entire Western Pacific and Far East.

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As America led the Allies to victory, Roosevelt developed atomic weapons and founded the United Nations to convince his countrymen that the world was a safer place than they had formerly thought — and to have an international cover for the exercise of America’s dominant post-war influence in the world, as Britain and its Dominions, and the Latin American countries, could all be reasonably assumed to vote with the United States in a permanent American-led majority.

In the 22 years since the Cold War ended, there has not been a serious external threat to the United States

Soon after Roosevelt died, it became clear that Stalin was promoting world-wide communist subversion, was striving for atomic weapons and nuclear parity with the United States, and was violating all his commitments to Churchill and Roosevelt to withdraw from Eastern Europe within Soviet borders. Nine consecutive American presidents, starting with Truman, imposed a containment policy on the Soviet Union, until, without a shot being exchanged between the competing alliances, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed, and international communism imploded noisily into Marx’s proverbial dust-bin of history.

In the 22 years since the Cold War ended, there has not been a serious external threat to the United States. And so it is not entirely surprising that that country gradually has receded back toward its former, Americo-centric (and not very globally preoccupied) self. The outrages of terrorists provoked the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the terrorists did not threaten the existence of America, as Soviet missiles and the alliance between German Nazis and Japanese imperialists did.

The United States successfully deterred any national aggression against it after Pearl Harbor by maintaining a mighty defense establishment, projected latterly by a force of approximately a dozen gigantic aircraft carriers and a large number of accompanying vessels and pre-positioned forces and supplies in strategic areas. All of this still exists. But Americans are taking less and less interest in the upheavals of other countries, or the sundry minor aggressions between them. Even foreign terrorism is receding as an issue for Americans: Almost everyone who was even remotely connected to the atrocities of the 9/11 attacks has been hunted down and killed with commendable thoroughness and efficiency.

The United States could have taken over every square inch of the Americas if they had wished, and all they did was seize a chunk of Mexico

The Cold War-era claim of the left, that Americans were malign imperialists, was always rubbish. Americans never cared a jot for overseas expansion. The United States could have taken over every square inch of the Americas if they had wished, and all they did was seize a chunk of Mexico that that country could not settle and didn’t really occupy (Texas, Arizona, California, etc.) — and that was 150 years ago. It would have been better for everyone, especially the Cubans, if they had hung on to Cuba when they evicted the Spanish from the island in 1898.

George W. Bush had the idea that if he could spread democracy a little farther, it would end terrorism because democracies don’t make war or commit terrorist acts. But though the premise (which was hardly “imperialist,” whatever anti-war protestors claimed) was correct, turning Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies was not so simple, given that they had no history of freedom, nor any institutional structures on which to base such an effort.

Apart from hammering America’s declared enemies, the Iraqi and Afghan Wars haven’t accomplished much and have not justified their cost. This fact has emphasized and accelerated the retirement of the American people from their country’s former active participation in the affairs of every region in the world.

The real threat to the United States is an internal one: the disintegration of their society. One hundred million Americans have inadequate health care for citizens of a rich country, public education is not competitive with the systems of at least 20 other countries, the constitutional system is in permanent gridlock and has not dealt effectively with any major national public policy priority since the Republican leaders in Congress jammed through welfare reform 15 years ago, and only Reagan’s tax reforms in the 30 years prior to that. The criminal justice system is just a conveyer belt to the bloated and corrupt prison system for anyone targeted by omnipotent prosecutors. And the national debt, which was 10-trillion dollars in 2009, is 17-trillion dollars today.

Richard Nixon famously said that “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” They are doing it, and America must come home and change course.

***

Note: Thanks to readers who have pointed out that the bust of Sir Winston Churchill was not sent back from the White House to Great Britain, but has instead been moved from the Oval Office to the residential quarters. That does not alter the point I was making in this column last week, but I apologize for my error.

National Post

cbletters@gmail.com

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/08/03/conrad-black-america-never-an-empire/feed/0stdsoldiersUnearthed footage shows President Roosevelt being pushed in wheelchair, a secret hidden until after his deathhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2013/07/10/unearthed-footage-shows-president-roosevelt-being-pushed-in-wheelchair-a-secret-hidden-until-after-his-death/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/07/10/unearthed-footage-shows-president-roosevelt-being-pushed-in-wheelchair-a-secret-hidden-until-after-his-death/#commentsWed, 10 Jul 2013 15:15:50 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=335733

INDIANAPOLIS — A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death.

Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said Tuesday he found the eight-second clip while conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library couldn’t say for certain if other such footage exists but both said it is at least rare.

Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921 at age 39 and was unable to walk without leg braces or assistance. During his four terms as president, Roosevelt often used a wheelchair in private, but not for public appearances. News photographers co-operated in concealing Roosevelt’s disability, and those who did not found their camera views blocked by Secret Service agents, according to the FDR Presidential Museum and Library’s website.

AP / National Archives This image from an eight-second film clip provided by the National Archives shows President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, third from right, being pushed in a wheelchair aboard the U.S.S. Baltimore in Pearl Harbor in July 1944, depicting a secret not revealed to the public until after his death.

“This raw film clip may be the first motion picture images of the president in his wheelchair, and it was never meant to be shown to the world,” Begovich said.

Bob Clark, supervisory archivist at the Roosevelt library in New York, said he wasn’t aware of any other similar film.

A spokeswoman for the National Archives concurred.

“With respect to whether or not this is the earliest or only existing footage of FDR in a wheelchair, we cannot state that this is definitively the case, although such footage is certainly rare,” Laura Diachenko said in an email.

The film shows Roosevelt visiting the U.S.S. Baltimore at Pearl Harbor in July 1944. Eight seconds of the clip show Roosevelt exiting a doorway on the ship and being escorted down what is apparently a ramp.

AP files This Jan. 20, 1941 black-and-white file photo shows President Franklin Delano Roosevelt waving from the inaugural stand on Capitol Hill in Washington. Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921 at age 39 and was unable to walk without leg braces or assistance. During his four terms as president, Roosevelt often used a wheelchair in private, but not for public appearances.

The wheelchair is not clearly visible because the view of the president is screened by a line of sailors, but Roosevelt’s distinctive white hat can be seen gliding past the men at a lower level. Roosevelt, at 6-foot-2, was likely taller than most of the soldiers.

Although Roosevelt’s disability was virtually a state secret during his presidency, which spanned the Great Depression and most of World War II, it has become an inspiration to advocates who successfully pushed for a statue of him in his wheelchair to be added to the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington.

“To me, the importance of this clip as historic media imagery is that it reminds all of us that this president fought the Great Depression and World War II from a wheelchair. I think it’s a tragedy that we haven’t had many candidates for national office who use a wheelchair or guide dog or sign language,” Begovich said in a statement.

GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty ImagesCompetitors approach the windward mark during fleet racing in the 49er class at the ISAF World Sailing Championships off Fremantle near Perth, Australia, on December 12, 2011.

In the second of three excerpts from his acclaimed new book, Conrad Black explains how FDR won a third term — and prepared his nation for war

In 1940, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was still keeping his countrymen in the dark about his political intentions, and there was teeming curiosity about whether he would break a tradition as old as the Republic and seek a third term. As the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, bringing to 14 the number of countries that had been occupied, starting with Ethiopia, Roosevelt staged another of his political masterstrokes, by firing his isolationist war secretary, Harry Woodring, and bringing into his administration preparedness advocate and former Republican secretary of war and state Colonel Henry Stimson and, as navy secretary, the previous Republican candidate for vice president and comrade in arms of Theodore Roosevelt, Colonel Frank Knox.

The enlistment of these two prominent Republicans gave the administration the character of a coalition. Eight days later, the Republicans met at Philadelphia and nominated dark-horse utilities executive, Wall Street lawyer, and public intellectual Wendell L. Willkie, originally from Indiana, for president, and Senator Charles L. McNary of Oregon for vice president. The Republicans attacked the New Deal without proposing to disband any of it and pledged to stay out of war, but supported aid to the democracies and resistance to any European intrusions in the Western Hemisphere.

Still, Roosevelt kept his own counsel, though it is now obvious that he was planning to seek re-election. The Democrats met on July 15 at Chicago, and Roosevelt gave the convention keynote speaker, Senate majority leader Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, a message to read in his address. It contained the usual references to Roosevelt’s fervent ambition to return to his “home on the Hudson” (which is bunk, because if that is what he had wished to do, he would have done it), and said that he had no desire for a third term and that the delegates should feel free to vote for anyone they wished.

Anyone obviously included him, and by prearrangement, a barrel-chested official of the Chicago Democratic municipal machine, which had packed the convention, bellowed into a microphone in the basement that was connected to every loudspeaker in the convention hall: “We want Roosevelt!” The convention erupted in Roosevelt demonstrations, singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones,” and other Roosevelt songs, while the voice from the basement recounted every state and large city in the country as a place that did “want Roosevelt.”

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As a spontaneous move against the wishes of the incumbent, it was a fraud, of course, and was largely perceived to be so, but it did reflect the party’s wishes. Roosevelt addressed the convention by special hook-up from the White House, after he inflicted on the convention the mad choice of the mystical leftist Henry A. Wallace, agriculture secretary, as his vice presidential candidate. Roosevelt said that the war emergency would prevent him from campaigning, but that he reserved the right to intervene in the electioneering to correct “campaign falsehoods,” with little doubt that he would purport to find some. With that, he embarked on a country-wide tour of defense installations that was publicized as much as campaign appearances and had most of the characteristics of them.

The Battle of Britain for the air superiority that would be necessary for any German invasion of England, given the overwhelming strength of the Royal Navy and the certainty that it would fight with desperate courage to defend the home islands, began on August 8, 1940 and continued till late October. Roosevelt would replace British aircraft losses, but the United States did not have a fighter plane that was competitive with Britain’s superb Spitfire and Hurricane or Germany’s Messerschmitt 109. In the course of the battle, Goering shifted targets from aircraft factories and airfields to night bombing of cities, especially London, in order to reduce the number of German planes being downed. This tactic brought German losses beneath the level of their aircraft production but assured the replacement of British losses also. While bombing civil populations shook British morale, it did not crack, and the attacks outraged the world, especially in the United States.

We are still awaiting the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes

In the three months ending October 31, the British lost 915 aircraft but recovered most of the air crews, and the Germans lost 1,733 aircraft and lost all the aircrews over Britain. With their aircraft production holding, and unlimited resupply from the United States, it was clear that Britain had won the great air battle and would not be invaded. Churchill, a mighty orator, repeatedly roused his countrymen and stirred the whole world with Demosthenean tours de force on world broadcasts, including his immortal exhortation as France quit the war: “Let us so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire should last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ” They did and it was.

He concluded a broadcast in October: “We are still awaiting the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.” This was not an idle challenge; the capital ships of the Home Fleet were deployed to southern ports, and without air superiority, a German invasion force would have gone to a watery grave and any shore parties that landed would have met a reception unlike any that the German army had had since 1918.

Roosevelt sent the British 50 aged destroyers in mid-campaign, began extending American territorial waters from three miles to 1,800 miles, and ordered the navy to reveal the presence of any German ship to the British and the Canadians. He also secured the first peacetime conscription in the country’s history, of a million men, which he called, taking a word from the Revolutionary War, “a muster.”

Willkie campaigned with great energy and focused on his claim that Roosevelt would lead the country into war. The young men of America, he said, “are already, almost at the boats.” In fact, in retrospect, it appears that Roosevelt’s idea was to do whatever was necessary to keep Britain in the war, arm America to the teeth, and intervene when the Germans had been enervated by attrition, somewhat as had happened in 1917.

Toward the end of the campaign, Roosevelt emerged and gave some memorable campaign speeches. On October 28 in New York’s Madison Square Garden, he added the names of Republican congressmen “Martin, Barton and Fish” to a recitation of reactionary opponents; and the crowd, after the first instance, shouted out their names as he got to them. His defeatist ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., returned late in the campaign, to, it was widely thought, endorse Willkie, but Roosevelt had him intercepted when his Clipper flying boat landed at New York and brought directly to the White House with his wife, where Roosevelt persuaded him, allegedly by promising to further the political careers of Kennedy’s sons, to endorse him, which Kennedy did in a national radio broadcast a few days later (which Kennedy insisted on paying for himself ).

Messages to the White House ran 100-to-one in support of the president, and he moved into his unprecedented third term with an approval rating of over 70%

Roosevelt solemnly promised to stay out of war, advocated peace through strength, was supported by Willkie in calling for assistance to Britain and Canada, and smeared the isolationists as, in effect, Nazi sympathizers. His courtship of the Roman Catholics (and particularly his refusal to buckle to the prevailing enthusiasm to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War) produced a handsome reward as New York’s Archbishop Francis J. Spellman, who replaced the deceased Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago as America’s most powerful clergyman, issued a statement that was read in every Roman Catholic church in America, asserting that “It is better to have strength and not need it than to need it and not have it. We seek peace, but not a peace that consists in a choice between slavery and death.” It was a clear endorsement of Roosevelt’s policy, without naming him. At the decisive moment, the leadership of that Church delivered all it had for the president.

On election day, Roosevelt won, 27.2 million (54.5%) and 449 electoral votes, to 22.3 million (44.5%) and 89 electoral votes for Willkie. The Democrats made modest gains in the congressional elections. On December 29, 1940, in one of the most famous of all his fireside chats, Roosevelt addressed more than 70% of the country, and said that “No dictator, no combination of dictators” would deter America from being “the great arsenal of democracy.” Messages to the White House ran 100-to-one in support of the president and he moved into his unprecedented third term with an approval rating of over 70%.

The fall of France made the United States central, even more than in 1917, in the triumph of democratic government and the free enterprise economy, in the world. Roosevelt would assure Britain’s survival and await in hopefulness a German immersion in Russia (which he had predicted to Stalin) and a deepening Japanese immersion in China, until the time was right for a mightily armed America to assert itself.

In the supreme crisis of modern times, as in the supreme crisis of the Union 80 years before, and at the contentious birth of the republic 85 years before that, the head of the American people and state was a leader of surpassing political and strategic genius. The best was yet to come.

The American Civil War was over when Lincoln was sworn in for the second time in 1865. In the audience that day, with the new dome of the Capitol building looming over them, was John Wilkes Booth, who would shoot him dead a month later. His short speech, now inscribed on the wall of his memorial, calls for a “just and lasting peace,” and examines the contradiction of two sides at war, each invoking the will of God against the other. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes,” he said.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

With the Great Depression starting to ease, FDR spoke of a “change in the moral climate of America.” Having won every state but New Hampshire and Vermont, he sensed that Americans had “set our feet upon the road of enduring progress.” “Shall we pause now and turn our back upon the road that lies ahead? Shall we call this the promised land? Or, shall we continue on our way?” For “each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth,” he said, quoting lines by the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy that would later crop up in George W. Bush’s fifth State of the Union address. FDR’s most famous line from this speech, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” is often described as a cri de coeur, but actually set up the optimism of the next line: “It is not in despair that I paint you that picture,” he said. “I paint it for you in hope — because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out.”

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Watergate was still a secret scandal, and the Vietnam War winding down, when Nixon won his landslide second victory in 1972. At the swearing in, he spoke of the bleakness of spirit that had overshadowed his first inauguration, but said progress had been made, especially through contact with China and the U.S.S.R., so that now America stood “on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world.” Foreign affairs dominated the speech, as he sketched a new vision of America in the world. “The time has passed when America will make every other nation’s conflict our own, or make every other nation’s future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs,” he said. A year and a half later, Nixon resigned in disgrace.

Bill Clinton

Clinton had become the first president impeached by Congress, though acquitted by the Senate, when he was sworn in for the second time in 1997. He spoke of the so-called American century, the threats to its prospects, and the promise of the future, of the Information Age and the global society. “We began the 19th century with a choice, to spread our nation from coast to coast. We began the 20th century with a choice, to harness the Industrial Revolution to our values of free enterprise, conservation, and human decency. Those choices made all the difference.”

George W. Bush

As a president during two ugly wars, Bush’s second inauguration had to make the case not for peace, but for the just use of violence. He told his speechwriter that it would be the “freedom” speech, and variants of that word appear 50 times. “Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty — though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul.”

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/20/historic-moments-from-second-inaugurals/feed/1stdU.S President Barack Obama (L) takes the oath of office from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts (R) as first lady Michelle Obama (2nd L) holds the bible and daughter Malia (C) and Sasha looks on in the Blue Room of the White House January 20, 2013 in Washington, DC. Obama and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden were officially sworn in a day before the ceremonial inaugural swearing-in.Tough act to follow: Presidents aim high, but often miss the mark in second inauguralhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/20/tough-act-to-follow-presidents-aim-high-but-often-miss-the-mark-in-second-inaugural/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/20/tough-act-to-follow-presidents-aim-high-but-often-miss-the-mark-in-second-inaugural/#commentsMon, 21 Jan 2013 00:18:33 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=254295

As a memorable piece of presidential oratory, Abraham Lincoln’s masterful second inauguration speech was the exception that proves the rule about second inaugurations: They are a letdown.

Brief yet powerful, and drawing heavily on Biblical imagery, Lincoln’s address heralded the end of slavery and made the case for peace after the Civil War “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” A few weeks later, he was dead, his place in history sealed.

A century and a half later, as he swears his second oath on Lincoln’s bible Monday, President Barack Obama’s speech is not expected to live up to the standard of his hero and fellow Illinoisan.

“It’s a bit of a second marriage,” said Gil Troy, professor of American presidential history at McGill University. “You’ve lost some of your innocence, you’re going in rarely as enthusiastic. There’s often a sense of the problems, but there is also a certain kind of freeing, in that now you’re not running for re-election, you’re running for the bar of history, you’re running for your legacy.”

Which is to say that two-termers frequently aim high, but miss.

First inaugurations are typically a continuation of a campaign theme that promises a new beginning or a reset. But incumbent presidents do not run that kind of campaign. They run as steady hands and competent managers, which is less inspiring. Like a first-born child, a president’s first inauguration is full of promise, and nothing compares, because there is nothing to compare it to. The second time around, however, comparisons intrude, fairly or unfairly.

“You often have to somehow build on the imperfections of your first term as well as the successes,” said Prof. Troy. He predicted Mr. Obama’s speech will thus include “an argument about how great he was,” which bodes ill for the oratory. “The more you get into self-justification, the less poetry you’re going to have, the less rhetorical grandeur.”

Lincoln’s biographer Ronald C. Wright wrote that second inaugurals make greater use of the the first person singular pronoun because re-elected presidents “like to personalize second inaugurals — believing they have more of a mandate than the did the first time around.”

In Mr. Obama’s case, however, the opposite is true. He has less of a mandate, a reduced share of the vote, and the air of a candidate who succeeded because he was the least worst.

It is a peculiar pressure for a man who is famous for his oratory, but whose best — such as his disavowal of the ranting preacher Jeremiah Wright, with its meditation on race — seem to be long behind him.

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country

The best and most famous lines are all from first inaugurations: John F. Kennedy saying, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” or Ronald Reagan declaring, “Government is the problem;” Thomas Jefferson saying, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” or Franklin Roosevelt saying “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

There have been some memorable second inaugural speeches, “but they lack the poetry and they lack the energy,” Prof. Troy said. “The magic is gone.”

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FDR, for example, spoke about a third of Americans still being “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” which highlighted the “get back to work” message of second-termers, but the line is rarely cited as historic. Likewise, Bill Clinton’s second-term pledge to “build a bridge to the 21st century” sounds almost corny today.

Problems that were avoided or hushed up in the first term also have a way of coming home to roost in the second, as in the Watergate scandal that drove the two-termer Richard Nixon from office, or Iran Contra for Reagan, or Monica Lewinski for Bill Clinton.

Even without such grave scandal, though, Mr. Obama is vulnerable, particularly on the economy, and seems unlikely to take the bold leaps that great speeches require.

There have been second terms that seemed to start out worse than this one, such as Woodrow Wilson with the Great War looming, Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression, or Lincoln in the Civil War.

But of the three most recent two termers — Bush the younger, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Reagan — Mr. Obama is in the “weakest” political position, Prof. Troy said, “with the most problematic agenda, the most ingrained hostility from the Congress, and with the headaches seeming most intractable.”

“We’re far more aware of his limits and our limits and our collective headaches as an American nation than we want to be on this day, which is supposed to be a kind of bi-partisan, legitimizing holiday where we can all indulge in the fantasy that we’re just one country and everybody cares about each other,” Prof. Troy said. “The poetry will feel very leaden and very false.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/20/tough-act-to-follow-presidents-aim-high-but-often-miss-the-mark-in-second-inaugural/feed/2stdUS President Barack Obama (L) takes the oath of office as first lady Michelle Obama holds the bible in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington ON January 20, 2013.